Derek Moore wrote:
Tehehe, me too, actually! I was pretty impressed for
wikitech-l when
Sheldon appeared. You's a pseudo-celebrity amongst radicals, Sheldon.
Great! Does that mean I get groupies? ;)
Wikipedia is a natural place for me to show up. For one thing, I've
always been a bit of a computer hacker. (I founded the computer club
at my high school and got suspended from school once for hacking into
a university computer so I could learn COBOL.) Also, my last book
with John Stauber was titled "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry
Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future." We did a lot of
writing and thinking about the scientific method and the influence of
funding on research outcomes, and also about the nature and
limitations of academic peer review. I recently adapted part of
"Trust Us" for a medical journal, and when they asked me to offer
solutions for some of the problems that we posed, the best answers I
could come up with were: (1) better standards of disclosure regarding
funding and other possible conflicts of interest related to published
research; and (2) maintaining and expanding an "information commons"
in which research results are treated as public property and kept
freely available to everyone. One of the big problems for the
integrity of research these days is that corporate-sponsored research
tends to produce proprietary knowledge, which inhibits full
publication of data, methodology and other information. Companies
have good reasons from their point of view for not wanting to release
discoveries that they have paid for and from which they hope to
profit. However, there have been cases where companies have
deliberately suppressed data showing that their products are unsafe
or ineffective. Even where this sort of misconduct isn't occurring,
restrictions on proprietary information present a barrier to full
vetting and sharing of research results.
Believe it or not, I actually thought I was coming up with a new idea
when I first used the term "information commons." I was familiar with
the concept of open source software, but I hadn't really given the
concept much attention other than to think it might be nice if the
same approach could be adapted to things other than computer
software. Then last month I attended a conference in Amsterdam where
I heard about Wikipedia for the first time and thought, "Damn! These
people are already doing it!"
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (
www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------